We reported the other day that Mozilla released version 46.0 of its Firefox web browser, which happens to be a very important milestone for GNU/Linux users, as it finally brings the long-anticipated GTK3 integration.

COMPILER --
Developers working on the Rust programming language today formally announced MIR, but it's not to be confused with Ubuntu's Mir display server.

MIR is short for the Mid-level IR and is a new intermediate representation to be used by the Rust compiler stack. MIR has been in development over the past year and sits in between Rust's high-level IR (HIR) and LLVM's IR.

Since December, Simon has been working on a report describing the options the leaders of the Thunderbird mail client community have for hosting their project now that Mozilla is ready to take the last steps of separation they have long trailed. The report was published today and is now being considered by the Thunderbird community. While it considers a number of potential destinations, it recommends a choice between the Software Freedom Conservancy, The Document Foundation and a new, arms-length status at the Mozilla Foundation.

Just a few moments ago, we discovered that Mozilla has uploaded the final version of the Firefox 46.0 web browser to its FTP servers, making them available for download for all supported platforms.

The Firefox 46.0 web browser is expected to be officially unveiled by Mozilla later today, April 26, 2016, finally bringing the GTK3 integration for the GNU/Linux platform, along with improved security of the JavaScript JIT (Just In Time) compiler and support for using the Content Decryption Module (CDM) as a fallback for decoding unencrypted H.264 and AAC streams.

Besides planning for the Servo and Browser.html initial release this summer there are a lot of other exciting items on the roadmap for developers working on Mozilla's Servo next-generation engine written in Rust.

Among the hopes for Servo in 2016 are more performance improvements, continue advancing the browser front-end (such as the current browser.html effort), fill in remaining subsystem implementations, bringing the Windows port up to scratch, moving WebRender into production quality, and begin shipping Rust/Servo components gradually within the Gecko engine. Among the performance items on the agenda for Servo this year is CSS support on the GPU, SIMD layouts, DOM wrapper fusion, and more.

A group of the biggest US newspaper publishers — including Dow Jones, The Washington Post, and The New York Times Co. — have cosigned what they are calling a "cease and desist" letter (read it in full below) sent to the former Mozilla CEO's new browser company.

A quiet announcement about a new Mozilla project sounded like a death knell for the Firefox browser.

It wasn't. But the project, called Tofino, reveals the technology challenges Mozilla faces more than a decade after Firefox's debut. Hundreds of millions of people still use the browser, but its star is fading compared with Google's Chrome.

Mozilla released details about the Tofino project Friday, saying a six-person team at Mozilla will consider how to radically revamp Web browsers.

Back in March, a young operating system project attracted attention in the open source community. The project is called Redox and its developers are working on a Unix-like operating system written in the Rust language. The Redox operating system features a microkernel design (like MINIX), the permissive MIT license and some interesting design ideas.

While I read a lot of opinions in March about the developers and their design goals, I encountered very little commentary on what it was like to use the young operating system itself. This lead me to become curious and download the project's small installation ISO which is just 26MB in size.

Developing the Internet and defending its openness are key to global growth that is equitable, sustainable, and inclusive. The Internet is most powerful when anyone — regardless of gender or geography — can participate equally.

Today, April 13, 2016, Mozilla finally announced the availability of the final release for the highly anticipated Thunderbird 45.0 email, calendar, and news client, for all supported platforms.

After being in development for the past few months, Mozilla Thunderbird 45.0 arrives today in its final form, trying to be in part with its bigger brother, the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

We talked briefly about Mozilla Thunderbird 45.0 about two months ago, when we first spotted the first Beta build, which, at that moment in time, promised to bring the long-anticipated GTK3 integration to Linux users.

This is an update on the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program for the first quarter of 2016. MOSS is Mozilla’s initiative to support the open source community of which we are a part.

We are pleased to announce that MOSS has been funded for 2016 – both the existing Track 1, “Foundational Technology”, and a new Track 2, “Mission Partners”. This new track will be open to any open source project, but the work applied for will need to further the Mozilla mission. Exactly what that means, and how this track will function, is going to be worked out in the next few months. Join the MOSS discussion forum to have your say.

On Track 1, we have paid or are in the process of making payments to six of the original seven successful applicants whose awards were finalized in December; for the seventh one, work has been postponed for a period. We are learning from our experience with these applications. Much process had to be put in place for the first time, and we hope that future award payments will be smoother and quicker.

Today, April 11, 2016, Mozilla has announced the general availability of the second point release of the Mozilla Firefox 45.0 web browser for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.
While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it's not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week's Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies that landed in the repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.

What Is A VPN Connection? Why To Use VPN?

We all have heard about VPN sometime. Most of us normal users of internet use it. To bypass the region based restrictions of services like Netflix or Youtube ( Yes, youtube has geo- restrictions too). In fact, VPN is actually mostly used for this purpose only. ​

The Libreboot C201 from Minifree is really really really ridiculously open source

Open source laptops – ones not running any commercial software whatsoever – have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.
The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source and to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.